Importing Custom Materials

QUESTION

I have a custom material that I would like to use in my plan, such as for the siding, roofing, terrain, wallpaper, or apply to another type of object in my plan. How can I bring this image in to Home Designer and use it as a material?

ANSWER

Materials are digital images that can be applied to the surfaces of objects. You can create your own custom materials and save them in the library.

Bear in mind that materials typically cover a surface by tiling an image repeatedly and are specially edited so that they tile seamlessly: as a result, not all outside images that you may want to import will necessarily serve as effective materials.

To add a new material to the library

Select Library Browser to open the Library Browser.

Right-click on the User Catalog folder and select New> Material from the contextual menu.

In the Define Material dialog

Give the new material a short, descriptive Name.

On the Texture panel, click the Browse button to display the Select Texture File dialog, where you can select the material saved on your machine.

Note: The Select Texture File dialog will display the file types which can be used to create custom materials, which includes: *.jpg, *.jpeg, *.bmp, *.png, *.tif, *.tiff, *.gif and *.tga

Click OK to add the new material to the User Catalog folder.
You are now ready to apply this material like other library materials in your plan, either in the object's specification dialog, or using the Material Painter.

If you later move, or delete, the file that your material is referencing, you will receive a warning message when you open the file or take a 3D camera view, and the image will no longer be displayed in your plan.